This past year, 2012, was an eventful year. We had another Olympics, a U.S. presidential election, the warmest year on record, and lived through the Mayan apocalypse. However, many things did not occur that many of the trend seers predicted, especially dramatic events that made the boldest predictions.

As we enter 2013, time itself seems to be speeding up or condensing to make the potential for dramatic events more likely. Tipping points appear to have been breached on many fronts, and what waits on the other side is difficult to know.

But let’s break out the crystal ball here and make some bold predictions for 2013.

These predictions weren’t acquired by some esoteric powers to see the future; rather they’re derived from riding the current wave of information and guessing where that flow may lead. They may seem bold to some, while the most aware readers may recognize them as foregone conclusions.

So without further ado, here are our top 10 predictions for 2013:

1. Stock market decline: Many economic forecasters have been predicting a stock market crash every year since the financial crisis of 2008. Yet, it has remained strong and even hit a 3-year high in September, 2012. There are many false reasons for this strength that don’t have to do with real economic growth; devalued dollars, cheap money for Wall Street banks, corporations hoarding cash and investments, etc. It’s a false bull market. That is why we feel comfortable predicting a significant decline in the stock market during 2013.

The real economy has been papered over for decades, but the numbers in the false economycan no longer dam the wave of reality. Endless quantitative easing, a quadrillion in world derivatives, over-extended personal debt, lowest ever percentage of the population working, and increased social burden of record food stamps and other programs will finally burst the dam in 2013.

The Baltic Dry index, which is believed to be the best indicator of our consumer economy,suffered a dramatic loss in December. Some say a new recession is already here and the stock market will soon reflect that with a crash in 2013. Look for the Dow Jones to dip below the 10K mark (around 30% or more) next year.

2. Precious metals rise over 50%: Using the same data points as the previous prediction, we predict gold and silver to rise at least 50%.

As the mass exodus from the stock market and other paper investments takes place, individual and institutional investors will start a new gold rush. Indeed, this is already happening.

According to the second largest newspaper in Japan, Microsoft mogul Bill Gates “expressed annoyance over a Japanese TV program that spread rumors he was “conspiring to control the world population” through his efforts to promote vaccinations.”

Apparently, Gates’ annoyance in regards to these the matter carries far. After a 12-minute segment was aired in which Gates’ vaccination campaigns were presented as the population control efforts they are, TV Tokyo Corporation was compelled to assure Microsoft Japan that it would “remove the questionable parts from rebroadcasts and DVD releases, Microsoft Japan officials said.” The Japanese paper reported:

“Microsoft Japan Co. asked TV Tokyo Corp. for a meeting to explain the thinking behind the Nov. 2 installment of “Yarisugi Toshi Densetsu Special 2012 Aki,” saying the company was deeply shocked by the misleading content.”

The article continues:

“On the Nov. 2 show, the emcee entertainer spent about 12 minutes floating such theories as “Bill Gates has devised a ghastly program on humanity” and “Rumors say he is attempting to use vaccines to control the world population.””

Bill Gates also told The Asahi Shimbun that “dispelling such misinformation about vaccinations would help to save the lives of millions of children. He said he wants TV viewers to understand the real situation.”

A TV Tokyo representative admitted that after talking to Microsoft Japan, the TV station: “We will draw on the latest feedback for our future work.”, after which it removed the segments deemed as “questionable” from rebroadcasts and DVD releases.

Bill Gates is at it again, throwing money at any researcher with a claim to fame and everything to gain by using scientific advances to prevent as many babies as possible from being born. Soft kill drugs in the pretext of protection is the common theme for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Cheap, effective contraceptive and HIV pharmaceuticals are now the objectives soon to target the third world.

A University of Washington team has developed a platform they say simultaneously offers contraception and prevents HIV. Electrically spun cloth with nanometer-sized fibers can dissolve to release drugs, providing a platform for cheap medical use. The research was published this week in the Public Library of Science’s open-access journal PLoS One. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation last month awarded the UW researchers almost $1 million to pursue the technology.

Bill Gates told a recent TED conference, an organization which is sponsored by one of the largest toxic waste polluters on the planet, that vaccines need to be used to reduce world population figures in order to solve global warming and lower CO2 emissions.

Members of the Trilateral Commission’sNorth American Group and congressmen who attended the gathering struggled hard to hide their meeting in Washington, D.C., November 30-December 3. They wanted no public viewing of their efforts to get yet another war started in the Mideast.

The North American Group is a regional subgroup of the Trilateral Commission (TC), founded in 1973 by billionaire David Rockefeller to expand ties among North America, Europe and Asia.

Attendees to the secretive gathering met upstairs in the main lobby of the Library of Congress, which, though usually open to the public, was partially sealed off. Unless you had a TC pass, you were barred from entry.

As AMERICAN FREE PRESS goes to press, we have been unable to confirm whether all members of TC’s North American Group attended the confab. However, some of the best-known figures in this regional group include former United States Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger, Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice, former Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, the neoconservative warmongering academic Eliot Cohen, former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers and former Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.).

Those current senators and congressmen who attended the gathering slipped into the meeting by means of an underground railway that connects several congressional office buildings with the U.S. Capitol.

Some legislators walked above ground on their return because their offices were more convenient. At night, they were impossible to identify by their small congressional tags and their TC badges. But several were overheard telling their staff escorts that war was looming in the Middle East despite calls for spending cuts, tax increases and the so-called “fiscalcliff.” They anticipated much bloodshed.

“It could be the biggest [war] we ever had over there,” one was overheard saying.

“We’ll get into the fighting, too,” said another, but he appeared unhappy at the prospect.

If so, the war will “spill the life’s blood of our young men and the heart’s blood of our women,” he added, and it will be mostly financed with your tax dollars.

In the middle of the night at a U.N. conference in Dubai, the presiding chairman of the International Telecommunication Union conference surveyed the assembled countries to see whether there was interest in having greater involvement in the U.N. governing the Internet. A majority of countries gave their approval.

With a sufficient majority supporting the U.N. becoming more active in controlling the Internet, the chairman put forth a resolution. The chairman, though, insisted the survey “was not a vote.”

The resolution was supported by Cuba, Algeria, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia; the United States opposed it.

Transit authorities in cities across the country are quietly installing microphone-enabled surveillance systems on public buses that would give them the ability to record and store private conversations, according to documents obtained by a news outlet.

The systems are being installed in San Francisco, Baltimore, and other cities with funding from the Department of Homeland Security in some cases, according to the Daily, which obtained copies of contracts, procurement requests, specs and other documents.

The use of the equipment raises serious questions about eavesdropping without a warrant, particularly since recordings of passengers could be obtained and used by law enforcement agencies.

It also raises questions about security, since the IP audio-video systems can be accessed remotely via a built-in web server (.pdf), and can be combined with GPS data to track the movement of buses and passengers throughout the city.